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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes how film reproduces and/or contests the spatial practices of the most emblematic fascist monument in Spain, the Valley of the Fallen. I focus on two documentary representations of the monument made by foreigners, Hollywood director Andrew Marton’s El Valle de los Caídos (1963) and Italian Alessandro Pugno’s La sombra de la cruz (2013). I analyze how montage and cinematography tell a story of a Francoist space in two distinct moments in time. Though products of considerably different historical and social contexts, both documentaries tell a similar narrative of a monk who joins the Benedictine order located in the Valley, and both works seek to translate a national Spanish essence to a wider audience through a cinematic representation of a symbolic space. Marton’s film, a product of Samuel Bronston Productions, is a performance of the spatial aspirations and ideals of the Franco regime: we observe a “will to architecture” and a desire to create or recreate what Lefebvre calls “absolute space” through long shots and a filmic-cartographic aviator gaze. In the contemporary film La sombra de la cruz (2013), the gaze is dissonant and full of temporal and spatial contrasts, revealing the fragility, frictional core and threat of fascist spatial practice and ideology. Ultimately, this article reflects on the legacy of Francoist space in Spain and how the filmic gaze has evolved in response.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In October of 2019, facilitated by PSOE’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, Franco’s remains were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen and reburied in the El Pardo Palace cemetery, Mingorrubio. In addition, the government passed a new memory law with broad aims of resignifying the monument and of exhuming the bodies of those who were buried there against the will or without the knowledge of their families. Naturally, the changes to the Valle will depend on who is in power politically and how willing they are to fund the project. See Junquera (Citation2021).
2 By 1959, long after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and twenty years after its initial imagining, the monument’s fascist aesthetics were antiquated, and the Falangist supporters of José Antonio (whose remains were reburied in the monument in 1959) had largely been pushed out of power in favor of a more economically and socially liberal politics. Additionally, in 1959 Spaniards had little appetite for the bellicose discourse that the monument espoused both visually and symbolically. Rather than justifying its existence through violence and Falangist and Catholic myth, as it did in the 1940s and early 1950s, the official rhetoric of the Francoist regime in the late 1950s emphasized the economic and political achievements of Franco’s government. The official propaganda of the 1960s stressed that Franco had been obligated to start the war so as to establish a definitive peace in Spain and was subsequently able to build the institutions of a peaceful and prosperous future (Aguilar Fernández Citation2002, 46). Despite attempts to change the narrative surrounding the Valley of the Fallen, this new message is irreconcilable with its aesthetics and functions. Even at the time of its inauguration, the Ministerio de Información y Turismo struggled to make the monument profitable (see Rodríguez Tranche and Sánchez-Biosca Citation2011, 496–497).
3 The official data indicates that there are 33,847 people buried in the Valle, although this number is debated. Many of the Republican bodies were buried there without the consent of their families (Mateo de Castro Citation2019, 272).
4 See Costus’s series of paintings, “Valle de los Caídos”; films such as R. G. Garzón’s Tierra de la paz (1959), A. Isasi Isasmendi’s Tierra de todos, Rafael Gil’s Al tercer año, resucitó (1980), Fernando Colomo’s Los años bárbaros (1988), Antonio Mecero’s Espérame en el cielo (1988) and Álex de la Iglesia’s Balada triste de trompeta (2010); novels such as Fernando Viscaíno Casas’s Al tercer año, resucitó (1980), Almudena Grandes’s Las tres bodas de Manolita (2014) and Dan Brown’s Origin (2017); and photobooks such as Toni Amengual’s Flowers for Franco.
5 “Rhetorical Oratory” refers to the “filmmaker as orator, speaking in his or her own voice about a world we share” and to how the filmmaker constructs new impressions and insights through montage and voice (see Nichols Citation2010, 135–141).
6 I have defined a “Francostein” as a creation of the Franco regime that became uncomfortable, dangerous, pathetic and haunting after the transition to democracy (Stafford Citation2017). Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature of Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft’s gothic novel Frankenstein (1818), it is difficult to separate the Francostein from its creator. A Francostein, however, represents difference that once was not, what was once inside and integral to the system, and now is outside. Francosteins defy and disrupt Manichaean divisions and reveal uncomfortable traces of contamination that resist dissolution. Ultimately, Francosteins provide an important critique of Spanish society because they destabilize master narratives through their anachronistic temporality and uncomfortable in-betweenness.
7 As Harvey says: “The spaces of representation, therefore, have the potential not only to affect representation of space but also to act as a material productive force with respect to spatial practices” (Citation2000, 219).
8 Located forty kilometers from Zaragoza, Belchite, a symbolic battleground of the Civil War, was used symbolically and potently by the dictatorship in its reconstruction efforts. The dictatorship left the twelfth-century town with predominantly Mudejar architecture in ruins and a new Belchite was built just five hundred meters away. In the architectural magazine Reconstrucción, which documented the regime’s reconstruction efforts after the war, Pedro Gómez Aparicio wrote:
Junto a las piedras heroicas del viejo Belchite va a alzarse la traza cordial y acogedora del Belchite nuevo; junto a los escombros, la reconstrucción; junto al montón de ruinas que sembró el marxismo como huella inequívoca de su fugaz paso, el monumento alegre de la paz que la España de Franco edifica. Símbolo de dos épocas y de dos sistemas, los dos Belchites hablan, con el lenguaje mudo de escombros y de sus blancas piedras, de barbarie y de cultura, de miserias y de imperio, de materia y de espíritu, de la anti-España sojuzgada y de la España vencedora y eterna. (Gómez Aparicio Citation1940)
9 The Franco regime is responsible for the construction of over five hundred dams. See film “Aldeávila, una presa de récord” (Citation2021).
10 Camino real (1963), a film that highlights Spanish-American connectedness, is a thirty-minute documentary on the life of Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish priest who founded the missions of California. Sinfonía española (1964), 1 hour and 39 minutes, is a film that displays the cultural, artistic and natural wonders of Spain with the goal of promoting tourism and enticing US visitors to Spain. Finally, Objetivo 67 (1964) is an explicit propagandistic film about the technological and economic developments that had occurred with the Franco regime.
11 The narrator says: “There is poetry in the morning sun, it stretches yellow fingers through ancient alleys and green valleys. It warms old stones and old bones too. It fashions deep blue shadows and tosses golden spangles”.
12 The Real Academia Española defines intrahistoria as a concept created by Miguel de Unamuno: “Vida tradicional, que sirve de fondo permanente a la historia cambiante y visible”.
13 That Marton’s film is largely performative is further evidenced by No-Do 1041A in 1962, which records the filming of Bronston’s movie, showing the camera crews and essentially presenting the monument as a movie set.
14 With optical visuality I refer to the work of Laura Marks, who contrasts optic visuality with haptic visuality. Optical visuality “sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space”. It contrasts with haptic visuality, which is closer, multisensorial and lived (Citation2000, 162).
15 The film was relatively well received by the monks who appreciated the scenes of nature (although not as much the long scenes in the classroom) (Cabello Citation2013).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Katherine O. Stafford
Katherine O. Stafford is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the monograph Narrating War in Peace: The Spanish Civil War in the Transition and Today (Palgrave, 2015) and the coeditor with Ana Luengo of Perpetradores y memoria histórica (Hispanic Issues Online, University of Minnesota). She also has published several articles on Spanish visual cultures and literature Email: [email protected]